Here Be Sermons | Melting Asphalt

“BE GOOD” MESSAGES Similar to focusing on biographies apart from enabling grace is an emphasis on behaviors alone that also results in nonredemptive messages. Again, preachers of such messages are usually unaware of the harm of devoting an entire sermon to telling people to be good or holy. God expects holiness. He commands it. He devotes innumerab

A message that merely advocates morality and compassion remains sub-Christian even if the preacher can prove that the Bible demands such behaviors. By ignoring the sinfulness of humankind, which makes even our best works tainted before God (Isa. 64:6; Luke 17:10), and by neglecting the grace of God, which makes obedience possible and acceptable (1

The close of your sermon is an appropriate point at which to drive people to the specific demands of the text. I want people headed home each Sunday still wrestling with their need to put into action what they’ve just heard in God’s Word.

Without situational specificity, sermons will typically run out of steam after the preacher repeats the standard encouragements to practice the means of grace more: pray more, read the Bible more, go to church more.

On the best sermon highways, listeners concentrate on their destination and give little thought to the road surface. Only when the sermon’s ride gets bumpy do listeners begin to pay attention to the details of the pavement.

The success of this endeavor can be assessed by a bottom-line question every preacher should ask at the end of each sermon: When my listeners walk out the doors of this sanctuary to perform God’s will, with whom do they walk? If they march to battle the world, the flesh, and the devil with only me, myself, and I, then each parades to despair. Howev

This foe too often arises as an unrecognized side effect of a well-intended quest for authority. Evangelical preachers reacting to the secularization of both culture and church can mistakenly make moral instruction or societal reform the primary focus of their messages. No one can blame these preachers for wanting to challenge the evils of the day.

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. It has to be heard in that way. There are three parties to it, of course, but so are there even to the most private thought—the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to consider.